


And the Shepherd's Boy Says

by vailkagami



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bill and Nardole are not Missy's greatest fans, Gen, Psychological Trauma, Temporary Amnesia, Torture, in the sense that the events of Heaven Sent actually have consequences, the Doctor is very indifferent about being tortured
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 01:17:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16844227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vailkagami/pseuds/vailkagami
Summary: Something goes wrong, which is nothing new, and the Doctor wakes up chained to a wall, which is also nothing new. Except he feels like he  might have woken up in these exact chains attached to this exact wall, having this exact conversation with his interrogator several times before.And there are monsters lurking behind that realization.





	And the Shepherd's Boy Says

The Doctor comes awake with a start. He tries to jump up, but he's upright already. Metal clinks as he tries to move his arms. He stares at the chains for a second (classic, iron links connected to manacles, someone going for the medieval look) then he takes in the cell (spacious, smooth stone walls and a metal floor dipping slightly towards a drain in the centre). The man standing in front of him is wearing black clothes, with black gloves, and a smirk.

“Who are you?” the Doctor asks. “Where are my friends?”

His naked feet are slipping on the floor as he tries to take the weight off his wrists. They hurt, and he doesn't need to look to know they are slipping on blood. The muscles in his arms are screaming, his head is pounding, and there are numerous aches all over his body that he needs to catalogue in a quiet moment. He doesn't want to take his eyes off the smirking man, but considering his position, seeing what the man does won't enable the Doctor to stop him so he looks down his body and finds himself clad in the torn and bloody remains of his shirt and his trousers. There are small burns over the parts of his torso that he can see, in systematic patterns, and he can feel now that the soles of his feet have been cut open.

One moment ago he was in the rebels’ headquarters with Bill and Nardole, arguing with Irine, their leader, about the stupid rescue mission for her brother that he was very certain was leading her into a trap. No, that was two moments ago. One moment ago he was going on the stupid rescue mission with Irine, after convincing her to take only him and none of the others. They entered the prison building through a tunnel. He has a vague recollection of noise, light, Irine screaming, cursing. Then waking up here. So he's been arrested. Has Irine? Where is she?

He was knocked out and woke up in a cell. The old story. Except the skin on his wrists has been chafed off in a way that takes time and some movement. And the systematic patterns of his injuries speak of torture, which is ineffective on unconscious people. Never mind the fact that his sense of time tells him it's not longer Monday.

“Forget about my friends,” he rasps. “They aren't here; the TARDIS must have brought them home by now.” He remembers telling them to watch the proceedings on the TARDIS scanners; a clever ruse to get them inside so the ship could simply take them back to the university if things went wrong, without them having to run into it for some reason first. That leaves only one friend to worry about. “Just tell me how long I've been here.”

“Ah, clever,” the man says. The Doctor feels like he knows him, which he probably does, but try as he might, he cannot remember anything after the tunnel.

“I seem to have some gabs in my memory, though it appears I didn't miss much worth recalling,” the Doctor muses when the man refuses to be of any help. “You don't seem to be surprised so I assume that the memory loss is part of your service. What's that for? Did I learn something I wasn't supposed to know? Is it an automated process? Did I get bored hearing the same questions over and over again and knock myself out on the wall? I mean, it's all new and fresh now! I can't wait to hear what you have to say.”

“Your false bravado will get you nowhere,” the man with the smirk says. He's still smirking. “It'll only gain you more pain.”

“Oh, will it? How's that been going for you so far? Something tells me that you didn't have a lot of success with whatever you're trying to achieve here, and not just because I have a long history of not being overly impressed by people who decided that torture was a sensible career choice.”

“We've only been testing your limits so far,” the man tells him. “You know how when you have a new sexual partner and you spend some time exploring their weaknesses and what causes them the most pleasure?”

“No,” says the Doctor.

“It's kind of like that, only with pain.”

“That was really a very unfortunate comparison in this context.”

The smirk gets even worse. “It's more appropriate than you might think.”

“I don't really want to know what you are up to in the bedroom,” the Doctor says. His head is pounding worse now, as if the pain needed to wake up first. “Get on with it, then. Impress me with your newly found knowledge. I haven't got all day.”

He doesn't even know what day this is. His sense of time seems to have been swallowed by that headache. But he knows it's afternoon, and also that that doesn't matter.

“You will find that you do,” the man in black tells him. “Because I do, and that's the only thing that matters. I've got all night, too. So how about we start slowly, from the beginning.” He picks up something from the wall; the Doctor can't quite make out what. “Where's the rebels' hideout?”

“Oh, I knew it!” the Doctor complains. “That was so predictable. That was literally the most boring question you could possibly start with.”

The man steps up to him and presses the something against his stomach. The pain is searing, blinding. It shuts the Doctor up because he can't breathe for a while. As means for information gathering that's really inconvenient, and the Doctor makes a point of telling the man that once he can.

“You think you're so though,” the man observes.

“And the fact that we're still here proves that indeed I am,” the Doctor points out. He does have a breaking point; this man is very far away from finding it, and looking in the wrong direction. “Come on – oh, do you have a name? I'm sure you told me, but I'm horrible with names, especially when someone wiped my memory. I'll just call you Twyst, then, alright? You remind me of someone who went by the name. Come to think of it, I started out with no memory then, too. Funny how that goes. But you know, if you live as long as I have, things are bound to repeat after a while.” Talking hurts. The Doctor hopes his throat doesn't start bleeding and wonders how long he has been screaming earlier for it to feel so raw.

“My name is Janas.”

“I'm actually really sure it's not. Anyway, Janas, Twyst, whatever it might be, you're not even trying here, are you? I mean, by now you must know that doesn't work on me. So please tell me you've merely run out of better things to threaten me with, or it'll look like you just have a fetish.”

“I do,” Janas informs him. “And that was just a little reminder to get you in the mood.” It smells of burned flesh and the Doctor is fairly certain the shredded remains of his shirt have been fused with his skin where whatever Janas is holding touched him. “To remind you what we can do to _anyone_ down here.”

The Doctor doesn't like the emphasis on 'anyone' here, and just a second later, Janas lifts a hand and the door at the far end of the room opens. The Doctor expects some other prisoner to be dragged in, but the guard outside doesn't move from his position. A few heartbeats later, the screams start.

Irine's voice, yelling in agony. Screams that turn to sobs, and turn to scream again. Pausing every so often as Janas asks the Doctor questions. Where is the base? Who is part of the rebellion? Names, names! What secret codes are the rebels using? Fragments of words in Irine's screams, like “please”, and “stop”, and “don't”. The Doctor almost pleads as well, at first, for them to leave her alone. It's a reflex that would be empty here. He says nothing in response to Janas' questions, has no clever story for him to buy the woman who has sacrificed her entire existence for her people more time. His anticipated horror turns to anger very quickly.

Janas gives another sign and the screams die down. “Well?”

“You killed her.”

“Oh, don't worry. She's still quite alive, even if she might wish she wasn't.” He raises his hand and another scream pierces the air. “Aren't you going to help her?”

“That's a recording.”

Janas looks taken aback before he looks vaguely confused. “A what?”

“Spare me the act,” the Doctor growls. “Do you expect me to buy this, this freak show version of a torture chamber? The walls are way too smooth for the aesthetic you are going for. A real dungeon in line with the world outside wouldn't have a metal floor like this. And the air circulation tells me all I need to know about your air conditioning. We've suspected from the beginning that the people in power weren't quite living the same Dark Ages life as the rest of the population, and here's the proof. Never mind the most obvious thing: the sound. That's supposed to come from another room and travel through the corridor, but the resonance tells me that Irine was in this very room when you made her scream like that. Right there, over the drain.” He nods towards the middle of the room. “That's where you murdered her.”

“You're willing to bet her life on that? What if you're wrong? You're letting her suffer for some wild idea?”

“I _was_ wrong,” the Doctor admits. “The sound isn't the most obvious thing here. It's the fact that she's not in here with us so I can see you torture her live and in colour.”

“Sometimes it's more effective to leave things to the imagination.”

“Oh please. Someone like you wouldn't miss the opportunity to show off his work.”

Something in Janas' posture changes, tells the Doctor he's giving up his act. “And someone like you, I thought, would do anything to save a life. And yet there you were, listening to her pleas and watching her die without batting an eye. Cold, Doctor.”

“Says the man who murdered her.”

“I did not murder her. Her death was an accident.”

“No,” the Doctor says. “No. If you work in construction, and your toolbox slips from your fingers and lands on the head on your co-worker, that's an accident. If you torture someone and go too far because you get carried away and they die, that's murder.”

Janas makes a face. “You keep saying that.”

He keeps saying that. He's said it before, and more than once. This isn't the first time his memory has been erased, throwing him into this dungeon with no recollection of how he got here, doomed to follow the script his captors are laying out for him. For a moment the Doctor feels like falling as he wonders how long this has been going on, how many times they have played this game, how much he has forgotten.

For a moment the Doctor finds himself in another room, bright light getting dimmed down by twenty feet of azbantium while on the other side he _remembers_. Remembers exactly how many times he's done this before, knowing exactly how many, many times he will have to do it again, and knows that getting out, sparing himself further torture, would be _so easy_.

“And don't try to tell me she was asking me to give her rebels away to save her,” he growls, focusing on the here and now and burying the memory beneath the anger. “She could have saved herself, if she had thought that would be worth the price. I mean, you think there was anything I knew about the rebel bases that she didn't? For all I can tell, she was begging me to keep quiet.” ' _Please stay silent.' 'Don't tell them anything.'_ He's working with assumptions here, based on the limited knowledge that he has, the observations he can make. _If I didn't know better, I would say that I have travelled fourteen thousand years into the future._

“You didn't torture her just for my benefit,” he continues. “But she wouldn't betray her cause, and she would not have wanted me to do it for her.”

A muscle in Janas' face twitches. “Tell yourself whatever story you need to live with yourself.”

“I am telling you that I see through your little act and you can stop pretending. And something tells me that this is not the first time we are having this conversation.” _It's going to take me a while, so I am going to tell you a story._ “How many times has it been, Twyst? And obviously, it's never gotten you any results. Do you know what the first sign of madness is, according to the humans of Earth? It's performing the same action over and over again, expecting a different outcome.”

“It was worth a try,” Janas concedes. “An act of mercy on our part. If you had fallen for it, it would have spared you so much.”

“Oh, really now,” the Doctor groans. The groan being an act is an act. He is running out of air. “It was an act of desperation. You know you can't torture anything useful out of me, just like you couldn't torture anything out of Irine. And you couldn't make any of us talk by hurting the other, and do you know why? I guess you do, but just in case I did not tell you before: it's because you are a sadist who enjoys inflicting pain far too much to stop just because he got what he wanted. It's written all over you. Telling you anything would have done nothing to stop you, so I guess the temptation wasn't too hard to fight.”

“Everybody has a breaking point, Doctor,” Janas sneers, a hint of frustration in his voice. “It may take some time to find yours, but find it I will.” _How many seconds in eternity? And the Sheperd's boy says_

“Like you found Irine's? Or was the just the breaking point of her neck?”

“Something tells me you won't break as easily.” _There is a mountain of pure diamond..._

“Get on with it then.” Anything to leave the room with the wall. Any torture Janas has in store for him will be a welcome distraction. _I'm not scared of hell, it's just heaven for bad people._

“Very well, then.” Janas pulls out a roll of tape, tears off a piece and places it over the Doctor's mouth. “I do enjoy your screams,” he says, almost apologetically. “But I want you to understand that it will be some time before I'll bother to ask you anything again.”

-

Janas doesn't ask much, which confirms the Doctor's suspicion that they have been at this for a while. When he's had enough, the next morning, he leaves without saying anything else, and the Doctor has a feeling that he will be left alone for a long time now.

He's right. The heavy door falls shut and for two days, it is not opened again. They leave him hanging here, in complete darkness, to think about his options. Not an ineffective method, but the Doctor uses it to get himself into a healing daze instead.

He doesn't quite manage a trance under these circumstances, and there is not a lot of healing happening, but it is better than nothing. More than anything, it helps him pass the time without having to think too much.

Thoughts still come. He takes inventory of his injuries and comes to the conclusion that escaping under his own power is unlikely at this point. Has he tried to escape before? Probably. So what went wrong?

He would have tried to get Irine, if she was still alive then. Why did he fail? He cannot learn from his mistakes, if he cannot remember them. The Doctor hates this hole in his memory, hates not knowing things, even though the pain in every part of his body doesn't speak of happy times. They tried to use Irine against him, too, and that is worse. He had to watch her get tortured to death, always knowing that betraying her and her rebels might, just _might_ , maybe spare her further pain. That is one thing he is, guiltily, glad he does not remember.

When the door opens again on the third day, he is very thirsty, and starving. Predictably, Janas and his assistant offer him something to drink first thing, if he just gives them the name of a rebel. Just one. Could be anyone. Someone unimportant. The Doctor could just make something up.

But he refuses to play this game. “I guess I'll die, then,” he tells them. The raw dryness of his throat makes the words almost incomprehensible.

Janas smirks again. “You'll wish.”

-

Two days later, the Doctor is still hanging in chains from the wall, and his shoulders have been dislocated. Breathing is hard. He probably couldn't talk now if he wanted to.

His torso is covered in electrical burns. The people outside this tower are sleeping in straw beds and light their halls with candles. They have no written language, no knowledge. It's always easier to oppress people when they are kept in the dark.

But the rebels are smart, and they are angry. They have been effective enough to be taken seriously, and with the means the Doctor could give them, they might even stand a chance.

They are smart. Their leader has been taken. The first thing they must have done when Irine and the Doctor did not return is abandon their base. The Doctor could tell them where it is. It would harm no one.

Except for Missy, who has been locked away in their dungeon an hour after coming here. Apparently she has been to this planet before, when experimenting with being good has been far from her mind. Fortunately, none of the people remember her in person, but the Master has never been one not to brag about their achievements. She just _had_ to give herself away. The Doctor could keep the rebels from killing her, but if they fled the place, they certainly have left her behind.

Besides, they will be traces there. The lords of the castle have means of tracking people the rebels would never even have dreamt of, let alone protected themselves against. So the Doctor keeps silent for many reasons, not all of them Missy.

At least Bill and Nardole are safe. At least...

-

Janas is there a lot in the next few days. At least it isn't boring, the Doctor thinks. (It is better than the isolation and the darkness, when he couldn't tell if he had gone blind again and the veiled creature from the castle seemed to shuffle closer with every delayed beat of his hearts.) Maybe his torture will accidentally kill him, too. He wonders what he will do then. He doesn't want to regenerate here (or, quite possibly, at all) and give these people any ideas. This is not exactly the way he wants to go out, but it's not exactly a way he wants to live, either. His companions are safe. They don't need him to get out of here. The rebellion has what it needs to win now, even if it will take a few more years. The leaves only Missy to worry about, and he has no doubt that she will save herself in the end, as long as he doesn't give her away. She always does.

That doesn't mean he doesn't need to worry about Missy now. He worries want she might do if he's not around anymore to keep an eye on her.

He's lost what's left of his voice now, which Janas eventually notices. He actually takes measures to get it back for him, and gives him a little more opportunity to use it. The Doctor tells him a lot, but nothing that he actually wants to know. He can see the growing frustration and it fills him with glee. It is the glee of the very tired and very hurting and slightly crazy. He lets Janas see it, imagines that he has a deadline of some sorts, that the men in power are expecting results at some point.

The Doctor laughs at him until he chokes on his own blood.

-

“How do we get back?” Bill asks as soon as she steps out of the TARDIS and finds herself in the Doctor's office. “Take us back, Nardole! I know you can do it.”

“I don't think I can,” Nardole tells her, and there is something in his voice that makes her want to hit him just so she doesn't have to hear it. Resignation and defeat are not acceptable when the Doctor needs them!

“Of course you can do it! You can fly her, you've done it before.”

“Because the Doctor made it so that I could. He very specifically doesn't want me to do it now, else he wouldn't have set us up to be sent back here in the first place. Accept it, we're stuck here!”

“Accept it?” she echoes, her anger rising. “How could I possibly accept that? How can _you_? You've seen what happened! We need to help him!”

“He doesn't want us to! He wants us to be safely out of there before the people that took him and Irine can torture our location out of them.” Nardole looks like he regrets saying that the moment he does. Bill can only imagine what her face looks like now. She didn't so far think about what might happen to her best friend because she didn't want to.

“Torture,” she says, and hates how choked up she sounds; like a native child who has no idea how the world works.

Not this world. That other world, where the sky is back with the oily clouds of a hundred industrial ovens and the people whisper about the disfigured bodies of the ones who dared to question why any sort of technology is forbidden outside the factories, found weeks after their disappearance.

“Or he just didn't want us to be stuck there after they killed him,” Nardole amends.

“How is that better?”

“It might be.”

“No.” Bill shakes her head. “No, I'm not going to accept this. And neither are you.” She turns on her heels and walks straight back into the TARDIS. “Come on, Nardole,” she says as she stands in front of the console, as confusing and beyond her as always. “I can't do this without you.”

Nardole stares at her for an infuriatingly long moment before he comes to her side. “It won't work,” he tells her. “But I guess we owe it to the bastard to at least try. Actually, I am quite miffed that he would give up on us so easily. And that we fell for it. Can't let that rest on us, now can we?” He cracks his hands, and it's an act but Bill is grateful for it anyway. “So let's try this button here, shall we?” He points at a random switch and winks at her. “It's as good as any, I suppose.”

-

The Doctor comes awake with a start. He tries to jump up, but he's upright already. Metal clinks as he tries to move his arms. He stares at the chains for a second (classic, iron links connected to manacles, someone going for the medieval look) then he takes in the cell (spacious, smooth stone walls and a metal floor dipping slightly towards a drain in the centre). The man standing in front of him is wearing black clothes, with black gloves. His face is impressively blank and dull.

“Who are you?” the Doctor asks. “Where are my friends?”

His voice is barely there, and speaking hurts a lot. The man before him smirks. The Doctor remembers Irine and her stupid plan, how he prepared for the worst. “Forget about my friends,” he rasps. “They aren't here; the TARDIS must have brought them home by now.” Safely out of reach of whatever is happening here.

He wonders what has become of Irine; if she has ended up in a similar position as him.

An hour later he finds out.

-

He has been here much longer than he remembers. There is terror in that realization, and memories he has taken great pain to bury.

-

At least he can take comfort in the knowledge that they haven't gotten what they want yet.

-

“Who are you?” the Doctor tries to ask. His head is hurting so badly he is not sure if he really heard himself speak. He tastes blood. “Where are my friends?”

“That's what you always ask,” the man in black answers and rolls his eyes.

-

They left her alone ages ago. Seven weeks, or what would be the equivalent of seven Earth weeks on this planet. Missy has come to measure her time in those while she was in the vault, because the Doctor was following a schedule determined by students and his visits where the most excitement she got for fifty years.

One day they simply packed up and left, without a word of explanation. Missy, not being an idiot, did not need an explanation. The Doctor had come to her before accompanying the rebel leader on her dumb mission, and Missy doesn't need to be the genius that she is to understand that the dumb mission went predictably very wrong. No one bothered with her when the rest of this punk-rock revival band abandoned ship. In other words, they left her here to die.

Considering her history with this planet, she can't say she is very surprised, now that the Doctor in no longer here to protect her. She still finds it to be in very bad style.

The oil in her lamp lasts two days. In the darkness it leaves behind after it runs out, a small glowing pepple she picked up on a beach on Deri-Alano IV is her only source of light. Her food ran out six weeks ago. She didn't bother to ration it, as it would have gone bad anyway. Still, it would take months for her to starve, and while there is a chance that the energy bust from her regeneration would bash the bars of her cell in, she has no desire to let it come to that.

There is no way for her to reach the lock, and the door is irritatingly sturdy. Still, dying in a primitive cell like this would just be embarrassing. For her final dungeon she'd expect a little less gothic renaissance and a little more expressionism. Or impressionism, as the case may be.

What's not so sturdy about this place is the pillar the door is set into. It is made of wood, which is an old foe of sonic screwdrivers, but an easy victim to the forces of nature. It is very thick and sturdy, but the outer layers at the base, where it is set into the ground, are rotted by the dampness of the earth.

It is surrounded by stone that Missy can't dig through, but she can peel and scratch away layers of the pillar, until she reaches strong, untouched wood. It will yield to the rot as well, but that will take time. Weeks. Months, even.

Missy lays on her uncomfortable bed and enters a trance to pass the time.

-

The Doctor wakes up kneeling on the ground, his arms stretched over his head and held by chains attached to his wrists. He doesn't need to look to see that his arms are broken, and so are his legs. His head is swimming, he is very thirsty. Hasn't he been in a tunnel with Irine one moment ago? He doesn't know how long he has been out but he can tell it wasn't long enough to account for this thirst, or the half-healed wounds he can see on his naked thighs.

Lifting his head is too hard to even try. His shoulders are screaming. It is hard to focus, and for a second he gets lost in watching a thin stream of blood flow from underneath his body toward a drain in the floor just in front of him.

A pair of black shoes stands on the other side of that drain, attached the someone's feet, presumably. The leather is far too smooth for what this world pretends to be. The Doctor thinks that he could take these shoes out to the rebels and make them really angry.

“Who are you?” he tries to ask; not entirely sure if he has. “Where are my friends?” His lips move, probably, but his throat refuses to produce any sound.

“Your friends are with us,” the shoes tell him. “If you want to see them again, you better tell us what we want to know.”

Shock runs through the Doctor's body, making his shiver. If he's in this sorry state, what may these people have done to Bill, Nardole? Why did he ever bring them along on this mission?

Then he remembers that he hasn't. They are gone. And Missy is as safe as a prisoner at the mercy of people whose grandparents she murdered can be.

“I don't think they are,” he tries to say, but again his voice fails him. For a considerable time the Doctor has no choice but to let the man before him (he calls him Twyst in his mind) ramble on under the mistaken assumption that the Doctor believes a single thing he says.

It's boring. But the Doctor can draw conclusions from his words, like the conclusion that he has been here for a long time and has had his memory wiped more than once, and that is much worse than the pain that stabs through his chest every time he breathes in.

-

“My name is Janas,” Twyst tells him at some point, days later, while feeding him water so he doesn't die. “Don't bother to remember it.”

“Don't worry,” the Doctor tells him. “I won't.”

-

Half of the pillar's base is peeled away after the fourth time Missy woke from her self-inflicted stasis to work on it. She throws herself against the door and it gives, a little. Not enough. Even with her superior strength she cannot do anything yet. It will take at least another round.

Another few weeks of letting that little bit of water do its work. Missy has been in here all alone for a long time now. Her tactic of only being awake when there is work to do has saved her from starving to death so far, but she just cannot wait to get out of here. Eventually, she would stave anyway, but more than that she is really quite uncomfortable with how vulnerable she is in her stasis to anyone coming in here.

Interestingly, that hasn't happened yet. Obviously, the Governor and his henchmen never got the location of this base out of either the Doctor or his new friend. Which makes Missy giggle when she thinks about how everyone ran away in a panic, giving up most of their equipment and their best hiding place, for nothing. On the other hand she wouldn't be in here anymore if that hadn't happened. By now, she would have talked someone into letting her out of here, possibly with murder.

The rebel leader is probably dead after all this time. The Doctor is not, simply because that would be unacceptable. But he hasn't escaped either, else he would have come for her. Missy has given him no reason to leave her behind on this rotten planet this time.

Missy resists punching the door once more. There would be no point. Waste of energy. She lies down again, folding her hands across her stomach, and closes her eyes. Her thoughts make it hard for her to sink into a trance, however; constantly circling around all the things she is going to do once she is out of here. How she will make people pay, make them regret. There is such delicious violence on the other side of that door, denied to her for so long. The Doctor won't get a say in this; it's his own fault for sacrificing himself for such a silly cause like that, leaving her on her own to plot her revenge.

So soon now. All she has to do is wake up one more time, and it will be like no time has passed by then, no time at all...

-

The Doctor claws his was out of unconsciousness with weights trying to pull him back into darkness. His head is full of disjointed fragments of thoughts - Faces and names. 'That seems like an amazingly stupid idea,' Bill says in his mind.

He tries to move and finds himself hanging from chains. It startles him awake. He doesn't know where he is or how he got here, but he knows he is trapped and someone is hurting him. Are his friends safe?

Someone is moving around him. He tries to look at them, ask about Bill and Nardole (Missy?), but the light is so bright his head explodes into more pain and he has no breath to speak. Nausea is stealing all of his air. He can feel something move deep inside him, stabbing his insides, making him retch and possibly whimper.

“Now this seems to be genuinely pointless,” says someone with a deep voice very far away.

-

The Doctor drifts awake from a deep sleep. He wonders what happened. The last thing he remembers is the rebel base, trying to talk Irine out of walking into a trap. He can't let her walk into it on her own. He also can't allow anyone else to walk in there with her. (Such a brilliant woman, but blinded by her desperate hope that her brother might still be alive; Humanity's great weakness.) He remembers Bill complaining about the plan being amazingly stupid.

Where _is_ Bill? Is she here with him? The Doctor remembers an old prison building, a tunnel, Irine's back disappearing into the darkness ahead. It's all in pieces. The Doctor opens his eyes that want to remain shut and doesn't see Bill. He sees a stranger – lined face, greying hair, grey jacket. In a grey room. He's lying on something hard. The floor? No, too high. A table. Trying to move, he finds mostly pain. Dislocations and breaks, already healing.

How long has be _been_ here?

“Do not try to move,” the stranger says, his voice gentle, soft. It still hurts the Doctor's head. “You are badly hurt. My name is Derres. I am here to help you.”

The Doctor blinks in confusion. Where is Irine? Where is anyone he knows?

He didn't get these injuries in any kind of accident, that much is obvious.

“The people who did this to you are going to be back soon,” Derres tells him. “I have tried to stop them, but they will not leave you alone. I am your friend, remember? I can help you, but first you must help me buy us time. So please, just give me something to tell them. The name of the rebel's second in command, for example. We know it already, from Irine, but it will make it seem like you are finally cooperating. Remember they tortured her far away from you? They don't know you know that we know it, and so they can tell you're telling the truth.”

He's giving the Doctor a lot of information for someone who doesn't know he has no memory of any of these events. Conclusions: The memory loss has been caused on purpose and Derres is in on it. Next conclusion: Derres is full of shit.

Still, it's a nice try. The Doctor considers going along with it, just because lying down is nice and his abused muscles tell him he hasn't done a lot of that lately.

“Where are my friends?” he whispers instead. A whisper is all he can do.

He worries about all the things he's forgotten.

Derres' face falls. “The others got them. But if you cooperate, they might leave them alone, and we can save them when we get out of here. It's you they are most interested in, remember?”

The Doctor remembers. Bill and Nardole in the TARDIS, Missy in jail.

“I'll tell you,” he replied with effort. “Everything you want to know.” The man's face lights up with something like desperate hope that is probably genuine. Such a convenient emotion, applicable from all angels. “But I need proof that my friends are alive first. Bring them here,” he continues. “Let me see them.”

Derres' expression freezes. “I cannot do that,” he confesses urgently, but with regret in his voice. “Not without giving everything away. Please, you need to trust me now!”

The Doctor remains silent.

“We need to hurry,” Darres urges him. “A man named Janas has them. He's the one who hurt you, too.”

“Yes,” the Doctor rasps. “I remember.”

He watches as the other man's face shows shock, then disbelief, and then something like horror. The Doctor would have laughed, but it turns into a cough instead.

He thinks it probably gets the message across anyway.

-

He has been here for so long. The Doctor doesn't waste air on words, but he listens and deduces. He's been here for a long time, has forgotten over and over again, waking up in the same cell, asking the same questions. The others are changing the script every time, hoping for better results, but following a script is all he can do.

His body is too broken to escape now, but his mind is running through corridors made of stone, is swimming in a sea filled with countless copies of his own skull. Countless. A number too high to be counted to in one lifetime. A nameless number.

_And the shepherd's boy says_

“Where is Irine? What have you done to her?” He thinks he already knows.

“You will find out soon enough if you do not talk,” Derres tells him as he attaches something to the Doctor's back. He has taken off his gloves and his skin brushes against the Doctor's. “As then we will have to do more of it.”

Irine is dead; they tortured her until her heart stopped, months ago. This man was there, watching from the outside. The Doctor was there, watching. He did not talk, and neither did she, and there was much frustration and anger when she died. Derres' hand disappears, as does the impression of him memory, but the Doctor's own lingers, just out of reach. The memory block is not very deep. He can break it with some help, get back all he has lost. Remember everything.

_Bird?_

He needs to get his hands on someone who knows. Literally. And his hands are bound. But they won't be forever.

_Every hundred years_

He needs to do this before they learn where his breaking point is after all, or before he does.

-

The Doctor has to hide his time, wait for his opportunity. For what he plans to work, he needs to initiate the contact, needs his hands free, and they barely ever are, despite the fact that they are nearly useless now. It makes him wonder if he has done it before, if that’s what makes them cautious, but he doubts it. They are touching him quite liberally otherwise, allowing him glimpses of thought and memory here and there that resonates with the empty spaces inside him, but it's never enough. He needs to do this right.

His greatest fear now is that they will make him forget again before he can, and he will have to start over from the beginning. Who knows how long it will take him to have the same idea again, how many rounds. _How many seconds in eternity? And the shepherd's boy says_

He tries not to wonder how many times he has feared this before.

He doesn't know what triggers them to delete his memory at all. If it is something he learned here, or an attempt to start over from scratch, or general boredom.

He tries to prevent it this time anyway. Plays along more, makes it seem like what they are doing to him is working and that he is almost broken. Doesn't give away all the things they have unwittingly given away about themselves and this place. Not being able to brag is the worst about his situation, really. (It leaves him way too much time to think and be somewhere else. After so many years trapped in the confession dial, the time before and after is so insignificant that it's hardly surprising he feels now like he has never left.)

His wounds are still healing faster than a human's would. Obviously, they know this by now, but he hopes he's never given away just how nimble he can be with broken fingers.

“I really hope that you have remembered that name now,” Derres says, picked by up a conversation from two days ago. He just gave the Doctor some food, which he ate, and waters which he drank, and now he is preparing to take care of the wrist the Doctor cut open on the edge of the iron shackle before the thin but constant stream of blood can leave him too weak. The Doctor watches his movements with careful apathy. “All this could be over so soon.”

“What if I don't?” His voice is thin, and he lets a sliver of fear slip inside. Just a hint. Anything else would be suspicious. “How long are you going to keep me here?”

_Forever?_

“As long as it takes,” Derres tells him. He's unlocking the shackle now and the Doctor’s hand falls limply out of it. More pain. “How long do you think you have been here yet?”

The Doctor’s sense of time is perfect. They will know by now. “Seven days since I woke up,” he answers without hesitation.

“Oh, you would think so,” Derres says with a faint smile. He aims for friendly and compassionate in their interactions, but casual cruelty surrounds him like a cloak. “It has really been several months.” He keeps his face carefully blank as he asks, “Wouldn't you like to know how that can be?”

“I was unconscious,” the Doctor tries. He can see that Derres almost laughs at that; he's delighted. This is new.

“You're usually faster than that,” he claims. “But I can tell that your body is giving out now, and so, I suppose, is your mind. The truth is, we've been interrogating you for months, and whenever we grow tired of your replies, we wipe your memory and start again. How many times do you think we have had this conversation? How much more often do you think we will have it?”

The Doctor imagines that he would feel despair now if the information had been new to him. He says nothing and tries to look shocked. Derres smiles more, and not in the slightly sad, pitying way he usually affects. He's not even trying to pretend now, which means that he's probably close to the point where he will make the Doctor forget this again. Except the Doctor pretends to be close to breaking and Derres will not give up this chance without trying.

He will make the Doctor forget very quickly once he finds out this is an act. And then the Doctor will have to start over with nothing, so he just lets his head drop and mutters something under his breath.

“What was that?” Derres asks. The Doctor repeats himself. It's Gallifreyan, and not suitable for official occasions, but the Doctor made sure that wasn't obvious. It is important that Derres thinks he would be able to make out the words if only he leaned close enough.

He does, and the Doctor grasps his wrist with his broken hand. He tries to not make the movement look aggressive, rather desperate, because it's not like the other man would be able to tell the Doctor is breaking into his mind, or rather use his mind to break into his own, and this game needs not end here, but then the memories come back (Irine in front of him, waking up in chains, Irine being tortured in front of him, waking up in chans, Irine dying in front of him, Where are my friends, waking up in chains, so how about I tell you a story instead, Where's the rebels' hideout, At least Bill and Nardole are safe, waking up in chains, well over a billion years into the future, at least Bill and Nardole are safe, at least missy is safe, and the shepherd's boy says there is a mountain, waking up in chains where are my friends we got them just tell us are there birds here bet you won't see this one coming where are my friends we got them finally run out of corridor who are you waking up in chains

-

The Doctor wakes up in chains. “Who are you? Where are my friends?” he asks the darkness before him and the darkness chuckles.

-

“Where are my friends?” the Doctor tries to ask, his tongue heavy in his mouth and tasting blood. He feels the words echo within him, bouncing off the walls in his mind.

“You'll see them again if you cooperate,” the man in front of him says amiably. The Doctor has a hard time lifting his head enough to look at him, but when he does the sight is familiar, a face he knows well for all that he has never seen the man before in his life.

His name is Darres. The Doctor frowns at him, not sure he wants to touch all the things he can sense just beneath the surface. (He will in the end; he always does.)

He remembers Bill and Nardole now, safe on Earth. He doesn't say that, but hears an echo of the words anyway. He figures that Irine is dead and asks about her anyway, like he's following a script. He tries not to go insane.

The room is bare but for the torture instruments on the walls and the drain in the centre. He can't tell if that looks so familiar because he has seen it before or because he has seen so many rooms like this in his life, and often from the same perspective.

His wounds tell him that he has been here for a long time. Darres' lack of reaction to his initial question tells him that his memory loss in not an accident and nothing new. Everything tells him that he has played this scene many times before, and pokes at other memory he would rather leave behind a twenty feet azbantium wall, where it belongs.

The far door is open and electric lights falls in. Someone stands on the other side of the corridor, keeping watch. They come in now, a small figure in a hood, how classic. The Doctor needs to break through the walls around his memory, and somehow he knows that touching Derres and leeching off his memories would be the easiest way to do that.

He needs to keep sane, too, and that will be harder.

Luring Darres close isn't hard. The hooded figure comes close, too, and Derres gestures for them to free the Doctor of his chains and drag him over to where the drain is. Good idea. Derres is still close, and as soon as his hands are free, the Doctor lifts his left, because it is slightly less injured. It's shaking more than he thought it would, but Derres is right there, his back turned, the skin of his neck exposed underneath short cut hair.

The Doctor reached out, nearly closing the gab when a hand wraps around his wrist, covered in a leather glove that probably comes from the skin of the last member of an extinct species.

“No,” says Missy. “Bad idea.”

She pulls out a gun from underneath her cloak and shoots Derres in the face before he can react with more than a shocked whirl around. She could have shot him in the back with him never even knowing he was going to die.

He doesn't die now, not yet. He falls, and twitches.

No doubt Missy has already taken out the rest of this base, silently and effectively. Her weapon is evidently quite deadly if she allows it to be.

None the less she ignored Derres' slow death as he struggles to make noises through his failing lungs. She helps the Doctor lie down instead, slowly lowering him to the ground, and when he reaches for her face, she takes his hand into her gloved one and firmly presses it against his chest.

“Missy,” he tells her. “I need to know.”

“You really don't,” she tells him. “The last time you tried that, your brain just about exploded. If it makes you feel any better, the government is pretty much over and your rebels are more of less safe. No need to play the martyr anymore. Why don't you just relax and leave the heroic rescue to me?”

At least she won't have a chance to steal the TARDIS while he is down. The TARDIS is gone with Bill and Nardole and perfectly out of reach for either of them.

“No,” he presses out even as the darkness fades out the edges of his vision. “I _need_ to know.” He cannot bear not knowing.

She sighs and runs her covered fingers down his cheek. “I know,” she tells him. “Well, tough.”

Something pierces the skin of his neck and the darkness takes over.

As he sinks into it, he thinks he can hear the song of the TARDIS in the distance.

-

“That took you long enough,” Missy greets them when they step out of the TARDIS and into an environment that is nothing like the one they left behind a few hours before. “Normally the people the Doctor sends home to 'protect them' need about thirty minutes to figure out how to get back to him. Really, I don't know why he bothers at all.”

Bill seems to have nothing to say to that. She ignores Missy's words completely in favour of running to the Doctor's side and kneeling down by it. “What have they done to him?” she asks, her voice strangled. “How long has he _been_ here?”

“About half of one of your years,” Missy says casually, like that was nothing special. “A bit longer, really. Now, if you have only gotten back here a little sooner–”

“I don't know how we got back here at all,” Nardole tells her. “Nothing we tried worked, and then the TARDIS suddenly took off and got us to this...” He makes a vague gesture. “...place.”

“Oh, alright, you got me. That was all me.” Missy produces a small square from her pocket to show to them and then puts it away before Nardole gets a good look, but he figures it has to be some sort of TARDIS recalling device.

“So it was really you who was late, and you tried to pin it on us.” Now, that is making Nardole quite angry. Bill already looks heartbroken enough, and he's glad they cleared this up before she had time to get over the shock of the Doctor's condition and catch up with the conversation.

(It also makes him angry because once upon a time he might have pulled something similar on someone else.)

“What do we do?” asks Bill. “Is he dying?” she reaches out a hand to touch the Doctor's face and flinches when Missy grabs her wrist.

“He's going to be fine,” the Evil Time Lady says impatiently. “It takes far more to kill a Time Lord. Right now, he's just being dramatic. Fishing for some sympathy. Oh, look at me, I have been tortured for seven months! Get over yourself, Doctor.”

The Doctor does not get over himself. He remains very unconscious for all that Nardole can tell.

“Then why doesn't he wake up?”

Missy gives Bill a look that Nardole might once have given to a bug that had sat on his dinner. “Because I knocked him out, silly.”

Nardole nods thoughtfully. “That seems sensible, actually.” The Doctor does look rather pitiful; moving him without causing him further pain would be pretty much impossible. “So, do we take him to the TARDIS now?”

“No, I got it back here because I missed your company so much,” Missy informs him.

“Can we maybe concentrate on helping the Doctor now, and go back to being unbearable later?” Bill snaps. She reached for the Doctor's hand now, and again Missy stops her.

“Very well,” she agrees. “You are unbearable all the time, but I suppose I can ignore it for a few minutes.”

She moves to put her hands under the Doctor's shoulders, and Bill wants to take his legs but stops when her eyes fall on the man lying a few meters away in a pool of blood. “What about him?” she asks, in a voice that indicates she knows as well as Nardole that that man is not a fellow prisoner.

“He's dead,” Nardole hurries to tell her. “Let's just leave him here. Bill, let me take the Doctor, I'm stronger. Can you go open the TARDIS for us?”

Bill hesitates for a seconds, then nods and runs off to where the blue box is parked out in the hallway. Bill throws one last look at the man he can see clearly is not quite dead yet, and not even passed out completely, before he slides his hands under the Doctor's knees.

The Doctor has been wrapped in a coarse, heavy cloak, but even through the thick fabric, Nardole can feel how bony he has become. But he had been somewhat bony to begin with. Getting to this point probably did not take more than a few skipped meals, he tells himself, even as he stands and tries not to be shocked by the lack of weight.

He could easily have carried the Doctor on his own. So could Missy, who is far stronger than she looks. But, well, this is fine, too. Team building effort.

At least like this no one will be left behind when Missy inevitably takes off the moment she and the Doctor are both inside the TARDIS.

As soon as they make it inside and have the Doctor settled on the floor, Missy goes to the console and makes the TARDIS leave. Nardole does not doubt that she would have done the same thing if he or Bill had still been outside.

Or maybe not. But if she hadn't, it wouldn't have been for their sake.

Afterwards they settle the Doctor in the first room they find that has a bed, which happens to be the room closest to the console room taking the corridor to the left. Missy carefully removes the cloak she had him wrapped in and Nardole feels a little queasy at the sight. Bill looks like she might faint, or just lost a bit of her faith in mankind.

“Oh, don't look like that,” Missy scoffs. “It's not like that hurt _you_ , is it?”

“You really don't get how empathy works, do you?” Bill's voice is flat and she doesn't look away from the Doctor, but at least she found her voice again, and focusing on how much of a terrible person Missy is seems to be a good plan for the moment.

“I did tell you it looks worse than it is.”

“It looks really, really bad,” Nardole points out, even as he starts looking around the room for something like disinfectant, or bandages, or some really good painkillers.

“So even if it isn't that bad, it would still be really bad,” Bill sums up. Missy rolls her eyes.

“It just looks ugly. If he were dying, he would be all glowy now. Don't worry about it. Just help me make him look more presentable, so you two can stop your whining.”

As far as asking for assistance goes, that wasn't very inspiring. Missy is lucky that Bill and Nardole have their own private interest in helping their friend.

Two hours later, the Doctor looks less raw and broken, if only because they covered most of his wounds in bandages and wrapped him into a nightgown that covers the rest. He's warmly tugged into bed now and doesn't even look remotely like he's just sleeping peacefully.

“He should be okay in a week or two,” Missy informs them.

“Are you serious?” Bill sounds incredulous. Nardole would, too, if he hadn't already learned a lot about Time Lords and their fascinatingly strong recovery abilities.

“Quite. Give it a day and he will try to run across the universe again.”

Well, maybe not quite _that_ strong. “I'd make that at least two days,” Nardole remarks.

“I said try. It'll be fun watching him fall flat on his face because he ignores that his legs are broken.”

“Hilarious,” Bill says tonelessly.

“And of course it would never occur to you to catch him,” Nardole points out.

Missy scoffs. “Believe me, you don't want me to do that.”

“Right, of course. Because I so enjoy watching my friends hurt themselves.”

“You don’t?” Missy looks at him with eyes widened by surprise. “You should try it, then. It is quite satisfying, especially when they have no one but themselves to blame.”

“I think I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Your loss.”

“But why?” Bill suddenly asks. “Why wouldn’t we want you to help him?”

Which is probably the question Nardole should have been focusing on as well.

“Good old human sidekick,” Missy muses. “Always asking the plot relevant questions. I can see now why he keeps you around, really, I do.”

Bill makes a face, and so does Nardole. “Can you also answer the question?”

“If you insist.” Missy gave the hint of a bow. “You are aware that as far as torture goes, this wasn’t particularly effective. I know you are, because I told you twice. In fact, physically torturing a Time Lord is a bit of a waste of time. We’re rarely affected by what happens to our bodies, we have spares.”

Nardole spend enough time around River Song to be familiar with all the faces the Doctor had before, but he’s not quite sure if Bill has been aware of this little quirk of Time Lord existence. She doesn’t react, however, so he suspects that she was.

“As it happens, however,” Missy continues, “quite some time the Doctor got tortured by people who actually know how to properly do it, and he’s been able to walk away from that with his usual amount of sanity intact because he is incredibly good at suppressing the memory. Now, these people here have been erasing his memory over and over during his time here, and if he regains that deleted memory, the memory of that other place would be mixed in, and then his poor head might just explode, which at this point would be a bit of a bother.”

Nardole doesn’t understand half of that. The other half, however, he does understand. He has been around the Doctor and River for over two decades, after all. What he believes Missy is talking about here is something the Doctor has made a point not to talk about, ever, but Nardole still caught a bit of it, on particularly bad days.

Bill has no hope of understanding any of it at all. “What do you mean? What have they done to him? And what does that have to do with you catching him?”

In response, Missy lifts her hands to show them the gloves she has never once taken off while taking care of their friend. “Having travelled with the Doctor for so long, you cannot possibly have missed the fact that our species is telepathic. Or perhaps you have. Forgive me, I always have trouble remembering how much processing power you have in those tiny little brains. Let me just tell you now; We are telepathic, but unless someone is actively broadcasting, we usually need to touch the other in order to read their thoughts. Right now, the Doctor’s memories are blocked, but he’s trying to break that block, and once he makes contact with me, he will be able to use my own memories to break into his own.”

“Why would he even want to do that?” Nardole wonders. “Seems a bit silly. And stupid.”

“You know the Doctor.” Missy shrugs. “It would drive him crazy not to know anything, let alone something about himself.”

Nardole pulls a face. “Doesn’t really seem worth it in this case.”

“Hold on,” Bill says. “Does that mean you can’t touch him anymore?” She looks at Missy with something like wild hope in her eyes. “Like, ever again?”

That’s a good thought. Nardole quite likes it. He knows there’s an awful lot of history between the Doctor and the Master, and he gets that the Doctor is trying to ‘save’ his old friend, but like Bill he doesn’t like it at all. The Doctor is leaving himself far too vulnerable to the other Time Lord, and his friends would rather like to keep Missy away from him for good.

Nardole is aware of the irony that it may well have been his influence that made the Doctor save Missy from execution in the first place, all those decades ago. Now the idea that Missy may not be able to physically touch the Doctor ever again seems like a step in the right direction.

Missy regards them coolly, through half-closed eyes. Then she looks at the surgical gloves she had made them wear while tending to the Doctor’s wounds. “And neither can you.”

“What? No.” Bill shakes her head. “First of all, we’re not remotely telepathic.”

“Doesn’t matter: He is, and you have something resembling thoughts.”

“And we weren’t there when he was being tortured, so he cannot use our memories for anything.”

“At this point that isn’t necessary. He’s already broken through the block once using the man we left behind dying in the torture chamber. The wall is paper thin now. You know enough for him to punch through easily now. Or why do you think I have so eagerly been feeding you information on the origins of his injuries for the last hour?”

Bill’s voice sounds strangled. “I thought you were just being an arsehole.” She shakes her head and now sounds angry. “But it turns out you were actually an even bigger arsehole!”

Missy gives them a slight bow. “I aim to please.”

“What do you get out of this?” Bill demands to know. “You claim to care about him, and yet you do everything you can to keep him isolated from his friends for no reason, as if he wasn’t already lonely enough!”

“Do not dare,” Missy tells her, her voice becoming cold, “to assume that your pathetic existence could do anything to so much as make a dent in the Doctor’s loneliness. Do you have any idea how far above your primitive species we are? You being here makes hardly any difference, it’s like a human carrying a pair of ants around and calling them friends. It’s disgusting. I could just squish you before he wakes and then replace you and he probably wouldn’t know the difference.”

“I think you’re projecting,” Nardole growls.

If Missy’s little speech was supposed to be hurtful, it seems to have missed its purpose with both of them. “The Doctor isn’t like that,” Bill points out. She doesn’t sound defiant, just unimpressed.

“But keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better,” Nardole adds. “Obviously, what you have with him is so fragile that it can’t stand any proper competition.”

His remark earns him a nod of approval from Bill that nearly makes up for the dark and utterly terrifying look he gets from Missy at the same time.

“And do not,” she says, “ _ever_ , assume that you have the slightest grasp of what the Doctor and I have between us. Your miniscule lifespans do not allow for even the hint of an understanding.”

There’s a lot Nardole could say in response, and he is sure he will think of all of it later, when Missy is no longer in the room. For now he has to focus, after a bit of awkward silence, on another matter that the dear Lady of Doom has conveniently missed.

“Here’s something you seem to fail to understand,” he tells her and tries to sound triumphant. The look Bill throws him make him think he might have failed. Has he gone squeaky again? “You see this?” He lifts his now naked hands none the less, and at least _they_ don’t squeak, although right now that would help support his point. “Not actually my real body. You see, I lost most of that when I met the Doctor the first time, and he’s build me a new one. Which looks pretty much like the original – safe for a few details, but I won’t hold that against him – but it is very artificial. At this point I am more robot than living organism. So I can touch the Doctor all I want he it will do nothing.”

He does manage the triumphant look at the end, and he throws it at Bill, forgetting for a second that this won’t actually do _her_ any good. Still, it proves Missy wrong, and that has to count for something, right?

After a second, Bill nods and crosses her arms, sending Missy an ‘Up yours’ look.

“You’re still sentient,” Missy brushes off his brief illusion of victory. “Or what counts for sentience these days. That’s enough. What, you thought organic matter was the key? Really, how do you cope with such limited imagination?” She sighs, a little more dramatically than is strictly necessary. “How do you think he communicates with the TARDIS? Admittedly, she does broadcast on her own, but she’s still very much a machine, and an incredibly old and outdated one at that.”

“I thought they were linked somehow,” Bill points out.

“They are. Don’t interrupt me, that’s not the point. On our home planet, people love shoving sentience of some kind into inanimate objects. Everything made after a certain point in history is sentient in one way or another, even if there is really no reason for that. In the houses we grew up in, you did not need lockpicks to break open a locked door, you just needed a good argument. And the Doctor has always been somewhat competent at getting doors to work in his favour.” Missy makes a face, either at the memory or at them. “Now, I don’t know you that well, but I would think the Doctor picked himself some company that ranks just a little bit over furniture.” She stops for a moment, then grimaces. “Then again, it _is_ the Doctor…”

“Alright, we get your point,” Bill snaps. “So we can’t touch him anymore, ever. You do realize that it will be pretty difficult to keep him from touching us once he’s up and about.”

“Oh, I have the perfect solution for that.” Missy winks at them. “You need to leave.”

“Then so do you.”

“Ah, but would that I could! Dear, do you by any chance remember that vault I am usually locked up in? I am the Doctor’s prisoner and have to stick to his side, so tragic.” Missy presses her hands against her chest and makes a fainting motion. “However, with the two of you, two thirds of the risk will be gone, and don’t you think that would be for the best? If you go now, I can have you replaced before the Doctor wakes up, and he would be non the wiser.”

“You’re enjoying this,” Bill realizes. “The Doctor is suffering and you are getting a kick out of it! And no, we will not go. Who do you think you are?”

In response, Missy takes a step towards Bill, and Bill instinctively takes a step back. “I am the Master,” Missy snaps, harshly. “And you will-”

She flinches suddenly, presses a hand to her head. “Okay,” she gasps. “Alright, I got it.” The way she glares at the ceiling makes it clear that she is not talking to either Bill or Nardole. “No hypnotizing the Doctor’s friends in the TARDIS. Old habits, you understand. But that’s not me anymore, honestly.” She snorts softly. “It’s not like I _need_ to, anyway.”

The look on Bill’s face is hard to put into words. “What the hell?”

“Psychic block?” Nardole guesses.

“It doesn’t matter,” Missy tells them. “You’ll see that it’s a mistake to stay all on your own soon enough.”

-

No matter how strong her resolve to stay, Bill can’t shake the fear that it will be her to mess up in the end. After all, isn’t that the story of her life? And perhaps Nardole and her should have followed Missy’s advice and gotten out, even if the motivation behind it was ultimately selfish and cruel. That doesn’t mean it would have been all wrong. Because obviously the Doctor is going to get his way eventually and pull the trigger of the gun pointed at his own head.

As selfish as Missy’s request has been, Bill fears that her decision to stay may have been selfish, too. She doesn’t want to lose her best friend, or the TARDIS, or this life with her best friend and the TARDIS. She doesn’t want to give Missy the satisfaction. She wants to make sure that the Doctor is okay. And she doesn’t want the Doctor to wake up after all he’s been through, regardless of how much Missy claims it doesn’t matter, with them gone, and only her around.

She probably would tell him they have been horribly killed, or that they decided to leave because they hate him now. Or she would find a way to horribly kill them, and then tell the Doctor that they simply left for his own good. All of these are possibilities Bill can very clearly see before her mind’s eye.

No, leaving was never an option. And while staying may be for her own benefit as well as the Doctor’s, doing so doesn’t make her the bad guy in this scenario.

The Doctor stays unconscious for a day. Bill tries to spend as much time by his side as possible, but she keeps her distance, does not hold his hand, and imagines Missy chucking softly every time she sees her sitting stiffly in her chair. For all Bill knows, the threat to the Doctor’s sanity isn’t even real and she simply wanted to keep them away from him for shits and giggles.

When Missy is in the room, which is often, Bill keeps her distance. She knows, in theory, that the woman from the vault won’t hurt her, possibly because she can’t, but she also feels, on a deep, animalistic level, that she absolutely _would_ , and think nothing of it. Even if Missy is truly trying to become a good person, it obviously doesn’t come naturally to her.

The woman from the vault. There something wrong about that description in her mind, and it takes her a little while to figure out it’s the fact that Missy, for all her dresses and heels and her imitation of a crazy female Cartoon villain, doesn’t really register as a woman to her, just like the Doctor doesn’t count as a bloke in her world.

They are alien. And with the Doctor, that’s okay. With Missy, it’s terrifying, because there is no doubt that to her they are just insects.

Bill is scared of her. She’s not ashamed to admit it to herself, and she would absolutely also admit it to the Doctor, if only he would make the effort to wake up now.

He does, when she is alone with him. Bill wants to call Nardole, but the Doctor doesn’t seem to be in too much pain, nor does he seem to be particularly upset. He’ simply wakes up, moves around a bit, looks at Bill and raises his eyebrows. “Bill,” he says. “There you are.”

“Yeah, here I am,” she confirms. “Here we all are. No thanks to you, you utter arse!”

He frowns – not in confusion but like he knows what she’s so upset about. Not actually surprising, since he’s so very smart. But then actually it is surprising, because when it comes to feelings, he’s really not.

“I had to keep you safe,” he says none the less, and, yes, got it in one. “I promised I would.”

“Well, not like that. You don’t get to decide when we get to try and save you and when we run away, you hear me?”

The Doctor frowns harder now. “Yes, I get to decide that. That is the deal. I won’t let you risk your life without purpose, and if you can’t accept that, we can’t travel through time and space anymore.”

Bill opens her mouth, then closes it again. She’s been so angry, and now she’s even more angry, but there’s nothing she can actually say here. “You could have been killed, and we would never even have known.”

“I guess, if I had failed to reunite with you for a while, you would have figured it out,” the Doctor suggests.

“I really hate you sometimes, you know?”

“Yeah, I tend to have that effect on people.” The Doctor tries to sit up and groans. Bill has to fight the urge to hold him down so he can’t hurt himself. She doesn’t want to get too close if she can help it.

“You’ve got only yourself to blame for this,” she growls. “If Nardole and I hadn’t been banned from the planet–”

“Then what? Best case scenario, you would never have found your way to where I was, but you probably would have taken stupid risks trying, and if I had died there you would have lived out your life out there with no chance of getting back home.”

“Some best case scenario,” Bill mutters. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Worst case scenario,” the Doctor continues. “You would have found your way to where I was and been tortured to death in front of me in order to make me give away the rebels. And who knows, I might have.” He frowns again. “I’m sorry, Bill, but I just can’t see any version of events where your continued presence here would have done any good.”

“You really are as arse,” Bill tells him. “How about the scenario in which we manage to break into their prison and rescue you?”

“Not worth the risk,” the Doctor brushes away the idea. He tries to sit up again, never one to be deterred by broken bones and recently dislocated shoulders. “Do you have any idea how fragile you are compared to me? When I take you out into time and space with me, I am responsible for your well being, and I’m sorry, but your feelings about that really don’t matter.”

“Yeah, I think you made that very clear when you gave me your helmet and nearly died in space because of me.”

“Well, it was my fault you were in that situation in the first place.” The Doctor stops in his attempts of achieving verticality to look at her quizzically. “What, was I supposed to let you die there?”

“Of course not.” Bill realizes how that sounded. “I mean, it’s not like I’m not grateful. But if you had listened to Nardole and me when we wanted to leave, we’d never have been in that situation to begin with.”

“And everyone on that station would have died.”

“...yeah, I guess that’s that.” Bill accepts that there is no way she can win this one. “Will you stop that, please?” she tells the Doctor. “Keep still. Lie down until your body is done knitting itself back together.”

“Are you kidding?” The Doctor sounds scandalized, and like he is glad for the change in topic. “That’ll take days! I’ll die of boredom.”

“Then go back to sleep. I’m sorry barely not dying isn’t up to your standards of entertainment.”

“Yeah, it really is very inconvenient.”

Bill sighs. “Please, Doctor. Just take is easy for a few days.”

He falls back onto the pillow with a groan and somehow manages to make it look like he is complying with her request rather than simply running out of strength. “Where’s Missy?”

“Around,” Bill says vaguely, uncomfortably. “Why? How do you know she’s out of jail?” How did she get out of jail anyway? Bill should probably have asked at some point, but she doubts she would have gotten an useable answer.

“Because she helped me break out,” the Doctor points out. Bill remembers now that Missy told them she had knocked him out herself, so he probably saw her before that.

“See, that’s what people can do for you when you don’t send them halfway across the galaxy,” she tells him.

“Noted,” he agrees. It’s not really agreement, she can tell; he’s just done with that argument. “Are you going to help me up now?”

“What? No! I told you, you got to rest, or you will just fall flat on your face.”

“And here I thought, since my friends are conveniently around now, they might catch me.” The Doctor throws her a long look. “If you won’t let me go myself, I need you to find Missy for me.”

“Why?” Bill can’t help but ask. Perhaps because a part of her still can’t accept that anyone _might_ actually want to be in the same room as her.

“Because you are sitting on your hands like you think they might fall off if you came anywhere near me, and that’s not like the Bill Potts I know, so I need to find out what she has done to you.”

Oh. Well. Bill leans back a little, tries to look more relaxed. It was probably a bit suspicious that the Doctor was obviously in pain and she made no move to help him.

“She’s done nothing,” she says, and can’t believe she’s defending Missy of all people. “Not to us, anyway. I mean, I still don’t like her, but she hasn’t done anything but call the TARDIS and wrap up your wounds. Which are pretty bad, by the way.” Suddenly her eyes are filling with tears as all the emotions she has been holding back so far threaten to spill out. “Doctor, I’m so sorry.”

“What for?” He looks surprised, then looks down on himself. “This? This is nothing. I’ve had far worse.”

“How is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“I thought it might.”

“It really doesn’t.”

“I can see that now. Really, Bill, it’s okay. No need to be upset.” He reaches out to touch her face and Bill flinches back, almost against her will.

“Which brings us back to the fact that you refuse to touch me, and that just refuses to not be suspicious.”

“What happened to you, Doctor? Missy said you were gone for months.”

The Doctor sighs. “So it seems. Time is a bit of a blur when you don’t get to see the sky.”

“Not for you.” Bill feels her throat closing up and swallows to make it go away. “So Missy was right, then.”

“I don’t know. You need to tell me what she said so I can deny it.”

“She said they deleted your memories and if you get them back, your brain will explode.”

The Doctor is silent for a moment. “Ah,” he finally says.

“So that’s true then.”

“It’s not how I would have worded it. But I am lacking quite a significant amount of time, that’s true. Which, all things considered, is probably for the best. And it still doesn’t explain why you practically hiding on the other side of the room.”

“She said if you touch any of us, that would be enough to make you remember.”

The Doctor makes a face. “You vastly overestimate my telepathic abilities. I do not randomly read the mind of every person I shake hands with.”

“But you could, couldn’t you? If you wanted to. You could use me to unlock those memories.”

“Why would I even want that? Don’t you think I’m happy to be rid of them?”

“No. I know you, Doctor. It’s a mystery, and that’s driving you mad, isn’t it?”

“Generally, yes. But I’ve been tortured before, I already know what that’s like. It’s not like there are any great secrets waiting for me on the other side of that memory block.” The Doctor falls silent for a second, then adds, “Although I do wonder if those guys may have given anything away that could be useful to the rebellion. People tend to talk a lot if they can assume you won’t remember anything. No one can resist the urge to brag, especially if they already made such questionable career choices.”

“What does it matter now?” Bill hurries to ask. “We’re no longer on the planet. That’s over.”

“Oh, is it?” The Doctor’s surprise looks very fake. “You toppled the government then, while I was out? Handed Halao over to the people? I didn’t think so.”

“I’m pretty sure Missy killed everyone in the building.”

“Even if she did, the Gouvener would not have his torture chamber right next to his bedroom. The government goes on, believe me.”

Bill can’t believe what he’s implying. “So you want to _go back there_?”

“There’s still plenty to do. And so far we’ve done nothing to stop them except fail to save the rebel leader from a presumably very ugly death.” His lips turn into a thin line and Bill finally learns what happened to Irine. Probably.

She wonders if that is one of the things he _wants_ to remember.

“So you really wouldn’t be able to remember any of that if I or Nardole touched you?” Bill has her doubts. Her trust in the Doctor only goes so far where his own well being is concerned.

“How could I? You weren’t there, were you?” For a moment he looks very concerned, like he fears that the answer might be Yes after all.

“No. But Missy told us all about it, and she says that’s enough. In fact, I think that’s why she told us in the first place.”

“Bill, do you really believe that would do it? If you had been there, had seen it, I might use your memories as a key to unlock my own, but having heard about it from someone who didn’t even see much of it herself doesn’t exactly make you an expert on the events.”

“That’s how history books usually work.”

“I rest my case.”

“So you’re saying Missy lied to us? Why would she do that?” Bill can actually think of a few reasons, but feels like the Doctor, who looks and sounds like he’s about to pass out, probably doesn’t want to have this discussion.

The Doctor throws her a long looks from where he’s lying flat on the bed. “I know this must come as a shock,” he says. “But Missy is not a very good person.”

“I’m glad you noticed,” Bill mutters.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. It’s just, you’re so insistent on making her better that I sometimes wonder if you really realize how horrible she actually is.”

The Doctor snorts softly. “Believe me, no one knows that better than me. The fact that she’s my friend does not make me blind to her glaring personality flaws.”

“Right. It’s just that her ten thousand years of being evil don’t matter in the face of the fact that she’s kind of trying not to murder fifty people per day right now.”

“The Master isn’t that old,” the Doctor says, and Bill finds it worrisome that this is the bit that he’s debating. “Is she?”

Bill frowns at him, but he’s looking past her now, and shock runs through her when she realizes that this means Missy is standing behind her somehow and has possibly been there for some time.

So Bill turns around and there she is: leaning in the door frame, and why is the door even open? She is sure she closed it when she came to sit with the Doctor, and she didn’t hear it being opened.

Missy purses her lips. “Never ask a lady her age, dear.”

“Oh please. You’re no more a lady than I am a-” The Doctor shakes his head. It looks like he has trouble staying awake now, and of course he would pass out now, when it would leave Bill alone with his Evil Counterpart. “What are you doing, Missy? Where are we?”

“We’re in the vortex, silly. Also, I’m saving your sorry backside, as usual, and you’re welcome.”

“By making my friends scared to touch me?”

“That’s just a bonus. You know just as well that they shouldn’t.”

“Then you should less than anyone else.”

“And I’m not.” Missy lifts her hands. “See? Gloves. Like any sensible girl, I’m using protection.”

Bill coughs and would have chocked on her drink if she had had one. When was the last time she drank anything? Wasn’t there a kitchen around here somewhere?

The Doctor remains completely unimpressed. “Using your fashion accessories for your mind games now?”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Missy winks at him, then at Bill who really feels like finding an excuse to leave now, except she really doesn’t want to leave the Doctor alone with Missy while he can’t even get out of bed.

“Take us back to Halao. Right after we left.”

“What, you want to go for another round?”

“We’re not done there.”

“There’s nothing we can do right now.”

“There is everything we can do. Just try not to get locked away again. I have a better idea of their internal structure now, even if I didn’t see much.” The Doctor falls silent for a moment, his face darkening, and Bill knows what he’s thinking about. “We can’t leave things there as they are.”

“We can, and we will. Until you are better, anyway. It’s not like I can tell you where to steer your TARDIS, can I?” Missy blows him a kiss and leaves. The door stays open and Bill walks over to close it, feeling better with an extra layer between them.

“Are we really going to go back there?”

“Did you have other plans?”

“Not dying in an alien torture chamber, for starters.”

“Do as I tell you and I’ll prevent that.”

“Not have you die in an alien torture chamber either.”

“Don’t be unreasonable!”

“I’m serious, Doctor,” Bill tells him, seriously. “I was really scared for you, and I’m really angry you send us away, and that now Missy is in charge and I don’t know if anything she said has been the truth and it’s all really messed up.”

The Doctor looks at her for a long moment. Then he extents her hand in her direction, palm up. “Give me your hand,” he says.

Bill stares at it. It’s bandaged and doesn’t look like she could touch it without causing him pain, but there is enough skin visible for Missy’s warning to ring clearly in her mind. “Why?” she asks, suspicious.

“Because this is messing with your head, and we can’t have that, can we? Take my hand and see that nothing will happen, and we can get over this.”

The sounds very good. Bill would very much like to get over this. She starts to reach for the Doctor’s hand, then hesitates at the last moment. “This is not a trick, is it? Because using me to fry your own brain would be an incredibly shitty thing to do, and I could never, ever trust you again.”

“Nothing is going to happen, Bill.”

“Nothing is going to happen, Bill, as in ‘Definitely nothing is going to happen’ or as in ‘Something might happen but I don’t know for sure so if it does, you can’t say that I lied to you’?”

“Nothing will happen, Bill, and I know that for sure, and I can promise you that it won’t.”

Bill still hesitates, but the Doctor’s hand is visibly trembling from the strain of holding it up and she does, in fact, trust him that much. So she touches his fingers, just lightly, with hers, and nothing happens.

“See,” the Doctor says, letting his hand drop. “Nothing happened.”

“Okay.” Relief floods Bill with a few seconds delay. Now that the tension is falling away, she wants to hug him, finally, but of course that has to wait for other reasons. But there will be hugging later. Hugging and squeezing. He’s going to _complain_ about it.

“Now, will you please go back to sleep?” Bill gently takes his hand, still hanging over the edge of the bed, and tugs it back under the cover. This feels better than sitting three feet away. “Thank you,” she mutters.

The Doctor closes his eyes. “You’re welcome.” He doesn’t open them again but falls very silent. Bill doesn’t mind. Everything is going to be fine.

-

And of course it is not fine. Bill allows herself to drop her guard, and she allows Nardole to drop his guard, and if Missy continues to wear gloves around the Doctor, well, that’s more than alright with her. The Doctor recovers quickly, as appears to be normal for his kind. Missy is not impressed, and neither is Nardole who has apparently seen that before, but Bill can honestly say that she did not expect the Doctor to be back on his feet within three days, considering the state that those feet had been in.

Although “on his feet” is too generous an expression. For it to a really apply he would have needed to remain upright for at least thirty seconds. He manages twenty, and three steps. Still impressive, but a long way from going back to Halao to pick up where they left off.

The problem is that Missy, as promised, lets him fall flat on his face. And Bill has to admit that this was kind of the Doctor’s own fault for trying to stand in the first place. But she still goes to help him, and nothing happens when she touches him.

It happens again a day later, when he nearly manages to cross the room, and this time he has her help him into an armchair that Bill isn’t sure has always been in the room. He spends some time reading and she leaves him alone, except for the times she goes to check up on him, which is probably way too often.

The Doctor seems fine, or as fine as he can be under the circumstances. And yet there is something in his eyes when he looks at nothing and thinks that no one is looking at him that Bill doesn’t quite trust. She does her best to talk him out of returning to Halao, but it is little more than a token effort. He is dead set on going back and finishing their work there, which means toppling the government and bringing the rebellion to a victorious end in Irine’s place. Bill suspects he feels guilty for her death.

She thinks about asking if he remembers what happened to her, but that might lead to a conversation she doesn’t want to have, and on top of that she isn’t sure she wants to know.

Nardole makes a point of telling everyone that he is quite mad at the Doctor and will not have any sympathy for him if he hurts himself, but he does so while being in full mother hen mode, so Bill doesn’t put too much weight on anything he says. He touches the Doctor, too, when he carefully put him back to bed after falling over while telling him it’s all his own fault and that Nardole doesn’t care.

Missy also spends a lot of time with the Doctor. She doesn’t pretend to care, nor does she pretend not to. Bill doesn’t want to be there when she’s in the room, but she always lingers nearby to make sure that Missy doesn’t try anything ugly while the Doctor is weak like this. Whatever that may be. She doesn’t give any thought to the specifics.

Apart from the fact that Missy never takes off her gloves, which might actually be necessary, considering she knows more about the events the Doctor might want to remember and is actually telepathic, it’s hard to tell what she is thinking about everything. Especially since she seems to avoid Bill and Nardole where she can and only speaks to the Doctor. And when she does, it’s usually in a language Bill doesn’t understand and that the TARDIS doesn’t translate. She can only speculate that it is their own.

Sometimes they are clearly fighting.

Sometimes they are not.

Then the Doctor is well enough to be up on his own for almost an hour, and there’s no stopping him anymore. About a week after they dragged him back to the TARDIS and left the planet Halao, he sets the coordinates for the rebel hideout and there’s nothing they can do to make him go anywhere else.

“No one is here anymore,” Missy tells him, quite irritated but conveniently in English. “I know, because they all ran off and left me to die in that cell you allowed them to stuff me in.”

“Considering you murdered their ancestors, I think you got off easy,” the Doctor replies, unimpressed.

“Technically, it wasn’t actually me who killed them. Well, most of them anyway.”

“Technically you didn’t actually rot, so that’s fair enough, isn’t it?”

Missy makes a face behind his back as he works the controls.

“What are we doing here, though?” Bill asks. “Do you think they came back?”

“No, they won’t. They wouldn’t dare. There are other bases for them to go now.”

“Why, then?”

“Because I don’t actually know where those bases are, and I’m hoping to find something that might help me find out.”

“Is that why you never told them about this place when they were torturing you, even though you knew it’s empty now?” Nardole asked from the back and with crossed arms. “So they wouldn’t find anything?”

“You’re asking me?” The Doctor raises an eyebrow at him. “For all I know I did tell them.”

“You did not,” Missy tells him. “And you know it.”

“How so?” Nardole wants to know.

“Because I wasn’t found by imperial storm troopers and horribly murdered.”

“Give yourself some credit,” the Doctor tells her. “I’m sure you would have managed to play the fact that you were locked in a rebel jail to your advantage. In fact, how do I know that’s not what happened?”

“Let me correct myself: I know, because I was not dragged out of the jail and by imperial storm troopers and horribly tortured for information.”

“That’s a moderately good point,” the Doctor concedes. He’s still standing at the console, staring at the screen in front of him with a frown on his face that makes Bill look, too, but the symbols on display are incomprehensible to her.

She suspects that his expression has less to do with what’s on the screen and more with the conversation. The fact that he has to speculate about his own motives has to bother him horribly.

Eventually, the doctor pulls a lever and the doors open. Outside is the grim brown and grey interior of the underground rebel base. It’s mostly dark now, the oil lamps that lit it long since gone out. Only the TARDIS provides some light. Bill wonders if Missy had to find her way out in this darkness, or if she had some other source of light hidden somewhere in that dress of hers.

The Doctor goes over to the door but stops there. Bill goes over to the door but stops there as well. Her desire to step into that darkness is very limited, even knowing that it probably doesn’t contain anything but cobwebs and empty drawers. The place has been abandoned for half a year now, and it feels empty.

And cold. It’s really amazingly chilly down here now.

Nardole stays where he is, only stretching his neck to see past the people in the doorway. “Oh, darkness,” he comments. “Yes, I can see all the merits of coming back here.”

“What if we don’t find anything here that will lead up to their new hideout?” Bill asks the Doctor. “Do we give up then?”

“Never. We might just have to go and destroy the government ourselves, then. Probably easier that way.”

“Except we don’t even know how to get into their inner sanctum, or anything, really, except they exist, and are in need for new interrogation experts,” Nardole, ever negative, comments from the back.

“Right,” the Doctor says. “So lets search this place and make sure we tried everything else first before one of us has to apply for a job.”

“I’d do it,” Missy volunteers to the surprise of no one.

“Yes, start torturing people for money, Missy,” the Doctor says without looking at her. “That’s the best way to convince me you’ve changed.”

“It would be a great change. I never got paid for something like that before. Would you prefer I did it just for fun?”

“Not at all, is the expression you’re looking for.”

“Aren’t you expecting a little too much?” Bill mutters sarcastically.

“It would be for the greater good,” Missy points out. “And it would mean none of you would have to get their hands dirty. Admit it, having a former villain on the team does have its advantages.”

“Former?” Nardole asks, and Bill tells her, “I’m pretty sure the bit about applying for the open job wasn’t serious.” She turns to the Doctor. “Right?”

“Let’s not get into that now.” The Doctor rubs his hands. “There is work waiting for us here. Bill, I want you an Nardole to search the base for anything the other may have left behind. Even if it looks unimportant. There’s always something that will point you to the right place or the right person, if you know how to read it.”

“Why us?” Nardole asks, still not coming over.

“Because it should be safe, and I’ll be looking for-” He suddenly stops, and stared into the darkness outside. “Oh.”

“Oh?” Nardole stops his approach as if something were physically holding him back. “Oh, what?”

“What is it?” Bill also takes a step back, while the Doctor leans out a bit, as if to get a better look. Bill wants to grab him and physically drag him back inside. He doesn’t look worried, only curious, but that means absolutely nothing.

Also, once he’s inside, they could slam the doors on whatever is out there.

“I don’t know. Isn’t that exciting?” The Doctor throws her a brief grin. “It’s so rare I see something new.”

“What exactly would that be?” Bill peers into the dark and doesn’t see anything. “I don’t see anything.”

“Look closer.” The Doctor turns around and calls back into the console room. “Missy, what is this? Was it here already when you passed through?”

Missy grimaces and rolls her eyes and walks closer like this is the biggest hardship she has ever experienced. “What is it?” she asks, coming to stand beside the Doctor, and he takes her by the shoulders, mouths ‘Sorry’ at Bill, and bends down to kiss Missy’s cheek.

Missy realizes what is happening too late. “No,” she snaps, and takes a step back, but the only effect at this point is that the Doctor doesn’t have anything to hold on to when his legs give out, except for the door frame.

He holds on to it for all of three seconds before he sinks to the floor, curls into a ball, and hides his head behind his arms. Half a minute later he starts screaming.

-

“Can you believe this man,” Missy complain, agitated. The Doctor is back in bed, finally still. They dragged him here when he stopped struggling, but long before he passed out.

Well, long is a relative expression. All in all, it happened not three minutes ago.

Missy paces, to hide how shaken she is. In the moment the Doctor touched her to establish the telepathic contact necessary, she has gotten a glimpse of the chaos that is is mind, and the memories of the confession dial hidden behind it and mixed in with the previous months. The sheer duration of that time is staggering, never mind everything else that happened in there. Even a Time Lord is not meant to last even a fraction of that time. It is hardly surprising the Doctor suppressed most of that memory in order to remain sane.

Well, sane is a relative expression as well.

“No,” Bill says. She still looks shocked. Perhaps by now she thought that Missy was lying when she told them about the Doctor’s ability to ricochet himself off their memories by touching them and did not expect anything to happen, ever. Missy absolutely expected something to happen, because the Doctor just cannot let things go, but not like this. “Why would he do that to himself.”

“That’s what you are wondering about?” Missy asks, incredulous. “I, for my part, cannot believe he kissed me on the cheek. He should at least have gone for the lips! That’s how you do it properly. There are rules about this kind of thing.”

Bill stares at her. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Never had it, darling. Neither did he, so this isn’t all that surprising, is it?”

“But you said-” Bill interrupts herself. “He’s touched me before and nothing happened. So it was only you, was it? And you told us he could do it with us as well, just to keep us away.”

Oh, what has she done to deserve all these unfounded accusations? “Whatever would I get out of that?”

“You tried to talk us into leaving,” Nardole reminds her.

“And would that have been so bad?”

“ _Obviously_.” Bill’s voice is dripping with acid.

Missy sighs. “Just for your information, it _would_ have worked with you,” she clarifies. “If the Doctor had wanted it to. Surprise: telepathy is a conscious process, it doesn’t just happen. At least not in cases like this. And surely the Doctor would have grabbed the first chance he got with you, before he was fully conscious, except you told him you knew, and you would have felt bad about it.” She sing-songs the last bit, to indicate that she doesn’t feel bad about the Doctor’s action at all, from a perspective of guilt. Except for the part where she fell for the oldest trick in the book. She hasn’t been so embarrassed since she fell over a tripwire the Doctor had improvized in the most obvious place ever out of his bloody scarf!

Well, at least she’s had the upper hand in that one in the end. Quite literally.

“So what do we do now?” the bald guy asks from the distance. He always seems to be at a distance. Always looking disapproving. Missy suspects both have a little bit to do with her, even though he was the one who first let her out of the vault anyway. Maybe she should thank him. It had given her a much needed opportunity to show the Doctor that she can be a part of the outside world without destroying it.

Not that she would have tried, that day. The Doctor was stuck on Mars and many decades in the past. It would have taken forever for him to notice…

“Now, my dear minions,” Missy said, “You will do exactly what the Doctor has told you to do.”

The stare at her dumbly, both of them. How does the Doctor stand it, constantly surrounding himself with these slow creatures. “Go out there and look for clues,” she clarifies. “Why do you think he said that, just before taking himself out? So you would know what to do until he wakes up and won’t have to think of anything yourself.”

“Is he going to be wake up?” Bill wants to know.

“I am right now working on the assumption that he will. And when he does, he will probably remember all the useful details he’s been told by people who thought he would _never_ remember and your hunt for traces left in that cold, dark cavern will be for naught.” Missy makes a face that is supposed to convey how sorry she is for them. “So get going.” She claps her hands.

It takes some discussion after that, because the Doctor’s little friends think she’s trying to trick them or joking, when in fact she is very serious. Eventually they do leave, after she showed them that she could neither operate the TADRIS at the moment nor leave it. The Doctor is a paranoid bastard. She feels rather proud that all her efforts over the years are keeping him on his toes.

Not that she would strand the two sidekicks on this hostile planet just because she has the chance. She’s trying to prove herself better than that, after all.

It’s just that being nice all the time is so damn annoying and boring. If only the people she has to be nice to were on her intellectual level, or at least no more than ten levels beneath it. Bill and Nardole act like she’s being so difficult, when in fact being civil with them is roughly comparable to them being civil with a caterpillar.

And to think that for millenia, the Doctor has preferred the company of such creatures over hers…

Missy sighs, and runs her fingers through the Doctor’s hair. She’s actively blocking her telepahtic senses as she does so, not interested in getting another glimpse at the chaos in his mind. He will sort it out in the end. He always does.

“I wonder,” she mused. “Would you spend so much of your time among the lesser races if I hadn’t dedicated mine to giving you a run for your money?” If they had taken off into the universe together, as they planned growing up on Gallifrey, he wouldn’t need anyone else to keep him company. Neither of them would. Missy wonders what would have become of the Doctor, then, and what of her…

Too late to speculate about that now. Far, far too late. It didn’t happen, with the people they have been. But now, if she tries really hard…

Missy is not a fan of the idea of changing for anyone. There is a reason why she chose the title ‘the Master’ so long ago. Compassion does not come easy to her even for her own kind and for the species inhabiting this universe she cares only in a scientific sense. But in almost everything she’s done throughout her lives, the Doctor has always been a factor. Few of her schemes were truly successful, because she tended to sabotage herself by seeking out situation in which the Doctor was likely to show up and stop her. She has wasted years of her existence trying to take over Earth, a boring planet she had little interest in, simply because it is the one planet the Doctor always seems to end up on, all the time, and she really, really wanted his attention.

It worked, though, and for a long time it was a fun game that they played. Until the Master realized the extend to which the Doctor held the damage he caused, the lives he destroyed, against him. It seemed ridiculous back then, because those lives were so short anyway and so meaningless, but the Doctor tried to stop his old friend from harming them to the point where he was willing to accept the Master’s death in order to keep them safe.

When that happened, it was shocking, humbling, and infuriating. The idea that the Doctor would prefer those creatures over the Master! Missy still feels the need to sneer when she thinks about it now. Pathetic.

It did nothing to change the Master’s ways, however. If anything, it added jealousy to his motivations, and he pulled out all stops, assuming that if he annihilated the Doctor’s favourite species completely and in the most degrading ways, the Doctor would get his point, and he would get all of the Doctor’s attention. If Earth was gone from history, that would be one less distraction between them and maybe one day, once the Doctor got over sulking about it, they could go back to how things were.

In case the Doctor somehow missed what this was all about, the Master then decided to turn the Doctor’s entire favourite race into himself. Missy does admit that that one was perhaps a little bit over the top. Also, not very subtle. But then, she wasn’t quite sane back then.

Nor is she now, but that is a different matter altogether. Although sometimes she does wonder if her willingness to change her ways just to be closer to the Doctor again is a sign that she’s gotten better, or worse.

He send her his confession dial, back when he thought he was going to die. Which meant that even though she had faked her death right before his eyes when they met before, he knew she wasn’t gone and approved of it. She was still the most important person to him, as evidenced by the little disk he entrusted her with.

And then she tried to trick him into killing his human pet and he abandoned her on Skaro among the Daleks. Things had been going pretty well right until that point.

Looking back, Missy wonders if perhaps she panicked. After all, previously in that adventure she had dropped everything to save the Doctor from getting his regeneration energy drained (on purpose, and he couldn’t have known she was still alive to rescue him this time), and that made it a bit hard to keep up the mandatory layer of indifference. Never mind that she and Clara were only involved in the whole thing because she had dropped everything to stage a dramatic return on Earth after the Doctor send her a bloody suicide note. She couldn’t allow him to to think she had gone soft in any way, so into the Dalek Clara went. A bit of a pity, after all the trouble Missy went through to get them together, but, well, sacrifices had to be made.

And then the next time they meet, Missy has gotten herself into a bit of a situation with intergalactic law (and it is not a compliment to intergalactic law that that took so long) and is about to be executed by people who actually know how. And the Doctor is willing to do it for them. Not happy, but willing. If anything told Missy just how much got broken between them over the years, that was it.

The plea to chance happened predominantly to save her life, as it was. It did not come from nowhere, however. And it was not entirely insincere. There was a point where Missy had to decide once and for all where her priorities lay: keep on being the cosmic menace she so loves being, or salvage what is left of her relationship with the only person in the cosmos who means anything to her. Because the Doctor was about to give up on her, and if she betrayed him now, he would, once and for all. He might not even really hate her then. Missy fears that at some point he might just stop caring.

So if she has to try not being completely evil in order to remain a part of his life, so be it.

That doesn’t mean it comes naturally. It does present a challenge, however, and she’s always up for a challenge. Wouldn’t want things to be boring, now.

And maybe, just maybe, if they spent some actual time together, she thought, if they talked like they used to, maybe she could make the Doctor see all the points in which they are alike – or could be alike, if only he would allow himself to be a little bit more like her. Because he could be. She knows that. And so does he.

“That’s why being good is a choice,” he merely pointed out the first time she brought it up. “As is being evil.

So much for that. But there’s time. A thousand years. And at the very least there’s the comfortable knowledge that this time the Doctor is sticking to Earth not despite the Master, but because of her.

And it was nice to know that he cared enough to try and alleviate her boredom, even if she gave him a hard time. That was no act either; she did resent him for actually locking her up as he had promised he would, although she does admit that it beats being dead.

A thousand years in a vault. One that is bigger on the inside and has a lot more comfort than the average prison cell, but it is a prison cell none the less. Intellectually, Missy knows that she deserves worse. She has worked hard for that. But from an emotional point of view, a thousand years are a bloody long time, even for her.

So she’s pretty happy that thanks to the Doctor and Bill falling down a hole on Mars, her time in there has, for now at least, been cut very, very short.

Although a thousand years are nothing compared to the four billion and then some that the Doctor had been stuck in the confession dial. The mere idea of that makes Missy uneasy. It also makes her very angry.

She has no doubts that at some point her path and Rassilon’s will cross again. The founder of their illustrious civilisation may think the Master was furious the last time they met, when he kept the Time Lords from ascending into conceptual space out of humiliation and wounded pride. If he thinks damning the species and kicking Rassilon’s arse so hard he regenerated is the worst the Master can do, he is in for an unpleasant surprise.

Missy isn’t very good at caring for people. If she can combine that with violence and petty revenge, though, maybe she can make it bearable.

The children come back after two hours, which hardly seems like enough time to thoroughly search a base of this size in total darkness. They found a bunch of papers that have been shoved behind a shelf and forgotten about. The TARDIS doesn’t translate the writing on them with the Doctor out of commission, so they can’t tell if it’s anything useful. Missy could read it, of course, but she’s not particularly interested right now, and neither of the others asks her for a translation. Missy would like to think that they don’t want to bother her, but she suspects that it has more to do with them fearing she will tell them it’s a cooking recipe and send them back out.

They are lucky for now. Let the Doctor deal with that when he wakes up.

He does wake up after about a day, which is pretty good, considering. “That was really very stupid,” Missy tells him when he does. “Though I cannot say I’m surprised.”

The Doctor looks at her and he seems only a little bit crazy. Hardly more than usual. “It worked, though, didn’t it?”

“Did it?” Missy wonders.

They are alone, the humans having gone to sleep a few hours ago. Missy has not slept since she last woke from her trance; a Gallifreyan doesn’t need much rest, unless they insist on being idiotic.

“Yeah.” The Doctor doesn’t elaborate. He closes his eyes and doesn’t open them again, but she can tell he’s not asleep. After a long moment of half scowling at him, Missy sighs. “Move,” she commands, but rather than wait for him to comply, she pushes him up until there is enough room for her to sit against the headboard of the bed with the Doctor’s head and bony shoulders resting heavily against her. Her skirts make it a little bit awkward, but by now she has learned how to navigate them.

The Doctor doesn’t protest. He barely blinks at her and just settles into the position. Missy lays her hand on his forehead in a gesture that is both tender and practical.

Like this, she can sense his mind, but it is careful, and consensual. The Doctor’s shields are back up and he’s sharing with her only what he wants her to see. The memories that caused his mind to overload are back behind walls of suppression, but those walls are thinner now where the memories of the time in the Halao dungeon are concerned.

At least those memories are back, as the Doctor wanted. Missy pries, and expects to see information that could be used against the government, something to make this all worth it for someone who cares what happens to this planet.

And that knowledge is there, too, she can tell. Not much, but enough for someone like the Doctor to work with. That’s not what she finds first. The first thing on the Doctor’s mind is the memory of the woman called Irine dying in agony.

“She dedicated her life to helping her people and didn’t give in even to the end,” the Doctor lets her know when he senses Missy’s confusion. “She deserves for someone to remember.”

“Does it help you save her people, though?” Missy wonders. “Does it give you anything useful? If torturing yourself over something you can’t change for no reason is considered being a good person, then I’m afraid I will never get there, because I would never consider that worth it.”

“That’s not the kind of person you need to be,” the Doctor assures her. He sounds exhausted, and he looks old. Not in the sense his face is lined and would look old to human eyes. He looks like someone who has lived too long. “I just need you to be better.”

“Better than what?”

“Better than the people who killed her.” The Doctor opens his eyes to look up to her, just for a second. “Better than someone who doesn’t care.”

Missy doesn’t know if she can care. She did her best not to be involved with these people who threw her into a damp, rotting cell upon arrival. Her relationship with them was tainted from the start, it seemed a waste of effort to care about their cause or anything to do with their personal suffering. Better try that on some other planet she doesn’t already have history with. They should have tried that giant space ship sending a distress call that was their second choice for her first trip as part of the team instead. Maybe she can get the Doctor to taken them there next.

They don’t even know what planet that ship is from, so Missy is unlikely to run into her unsavoury past there.

When the TARDIS brought them here first, quite by accident, Missy did not tell the others that she has history with this world, and that the government is using ways to oppress their people that she may have introduced in the first place. Because it’s been a while and she hoped it wouldn’t come up, but also because she wanted to test how the Doctor would react if it did.

Disapproving. That’s how. And by letting angry descendants stuff her into a cell to be picked up from once the adventure is over. A great start.

“I don’t know if I can do that,” she admits finally. “I’m not happy it happened, even though she had me incarcerated on a rumour. Does that count for something?”

The Doctor doesn’t answer with words, but Missy can still tell that it does.

-

Two days later they are standing in the hall that once held the seat of the government. Behind them are standing people in rough linen and dirty leather, wearing boots that have soles made of wood. They are standing in a hall with a domed metal ceiling and blinking lights everywhere, and cushioned seats and water running from a decorative little fountain in the middle of the room.

They are staring. They are going to be staring for a long time. There are a few people within the centre of this regime that have secretly helped them for years, decades even, and here the part where the Doctor did not allow the rebels so slaughter everyone they came across on their way in will really come in handy, because they are going to need those people.

For now, they are farmers and blacksmiths from the middle ages who suddenly see for themselves that they are living in a science fiction novel and everyone knew but them. As they walk over the expensive carpets and see the bed with build in screens, they are thinking about their children lying on straw, and they are angry and confused, but also vindicated.

The Doctor is watching them carefully move about, touch this and touch that. He has deactivated the controls for now, until everyone had a moment to calm down and stop randomly pressing on things that could do harm. Someone will reactivate everything eventually. By then, he plans on being somewhere else.

“Are they going to be okay?” Bill asks quietly.

“Are you kidding?” Missy replies. “Of course not. They are going to mess up spectacularly. Either they will bring down the realm within half a year because nobody knows what they are doing, or they are going to fall into the comfort trap and become the same despots as the ones they just took out.”

“Or they will manage to reform their society into a more balanced one,” the Doctor quips in. “It’s been known to happen.”

“Rarely.”

“Either way, right now they are opening the dungeons and freeing all the people who have been incarcerated by the regime, and that is something that will not be undone no matter what happens next. They are sending out medical supplies to the outer villages, and are closing the mines. It’s a start. What happens next will be up to them.”

If they mess it up, well, then the Doctor will probably end up back here again, one day, many generations from now. Probably. The universe is full of problems, and no one can take care of all of them. Not even in a billion years, or four.

Maybe someone else will take care of them in his stead. The Doctor believes, because he needs to, that goodness and kindness will always prevail in the end, as long as they don’t give up, because if not, what will be the point?

Maybe this, he then thinks. This moment, when everything is good, and everything is possible.

“So giving people a chance to screw themselves over on their own terms is what it is all about?” Missy decodes and the Doctor snorts softly.

“You’re getting there.”

Maybe everything is possible for her, too.

Somewhere in the distance, someone is letting out a shout. The Doctor flinches and turns towards the source of the noise, hoping that whatever this is will not have to result in running just yet.

And he had so hoped this moment would last for longer than thirty seconds.

But there is no danger there. Not overlooked guards with guns or a hostile security system, or a newly empowered rebel in possession of a gun making an early grab for total global dominance. It’s just a man, ragged and thin, reacting badly to the portrait of the world’s former president hanging on the wall.

It’s the same portrait that was shown, in lesser quality, on posters all over the towns, and damaging one used to be a capital offence until a few hours ago.

Now the man with the shaggy hair is punching that portrait in the face. Unfortunately, the face in question is just painted on canvas, and then the canvas was scanned and the scanned painting spray-printed on a steel wall. So the man is really punching a wall. And he doesn’t even punch it in the face because actually underneath the print-paint and the hint of structure, the wall is lacking any kind of facial features whatsoever. The man is really just punching a wall.

He yelps when his fist makes contact for the first time and cradles it against his chest for a second. But the pain doesn’t seem to deter him much. If anything, it makes him more angry, and he punches the wall again, harder this time.

The Doctor watches and can feel the bones of his own hand breaking against another wall. He has to look away.

His own personal walls are too thin right now. He’ll need time to repair them.

The Doctor tries to focus on something else, but everything seems to remind him of the castle all of a sudden. The white sheet draped across the table, the way an injured rebel is limping across the room. The faint smell of salt from the fish tank on the far wall. Bill stepping closer to him from behind overlaying the creature stepping up to him as it is about to kill him over and over and over and –

Missy takes his hand and the impression fades. It doesn’t go away completely but it become bearable just when it was about to overwhelm him. He can feel her in his mind, but for once she is adding stability rather than the feverish throb of insanity.

He turns to throw her a grateful smile, the first one in centuries. She meets his eyes evenly, then looks away as if this wasn’t happening, but her hand is still in his and when she starts walking to the TARDIS, now parked in the corner of the room like a forgotten art object waiting to be vandalized by the angry victors, she pulls him along.

The Doctor lets it happen and just shrugs at Bill and Nardole as he’s meeting their eyes, gesturing for them to follow. They do so with looks of bewilderment on their faces and share a look of their own that the Doctor doesn’t care to interpret.

Everyone else ignores them. They can have Missy with them, out and about and not locked up somewhere, because every who would arrest or kill her (and with good reason, the Doctor must not forget) is distracted. Eventually someone will notice. It is indeed time to leave.

They all make it back in without anything happening. Missy helps the Doctor operate the TARDIS as they send her back into the time stream, because one of his hands is still occupied holding hers. It’s probably not strictly necessary anymore, but it cannot do any harm to hold on a little longer.

“So…” Bill is drawing out the word, and eyeing their joined hands, but she doesn’t say anything just yet. “What now? Back home?”

“Sounds good to me,” Nardole agrees.

“Yes, back into the vault.” Missy rolls her eyes. “I cannot possibly contain my excitement.”

It’s better than the cell she just escaped from a week ago, but the Doctor doesn’t point it out. She is helping him right now, and he doesn’t feel like punishing her for it. “The idea was for Missy to prove she has learned something about not being evil,” he points out. “And this trip didn’t really give her a chance on account of her getting locked up right at the start.”

“Because she’s evil,” Nardole says.

“ _Was_ evil,” Missy corrects him. “Please. Tenses are very important to me.”

“I see no clear evidence for that past tense yet.”

“Which is why we give it one more shot,” the Doctor tells them. “Remember that distress signal we nearly followed before? Space ship. Contained environment. We’ll sort that one out, and _then_ we will go home.”

“Terrific,” Missy commends.

“But what it it goes wrong?” Bill wants to know. “Not just because of her. Just generally. Because, Doctor, you know as well as anyone that it probably will.”

“How come we never talk about the adventures where everything goes to plan?” the Doctor asks, offended.

“I’m serious. You’re still injured. What if there’s running involved? You’d be even worse at that than usual.”

“She’s not wrong,” Missy says, as if anyone had asked for her opinion. “Your current body isn’t exactly built for athletic movement.”

“It’s been good enough so far,” the Doctor scoffs. “And it’s a space ship. How much running can there be? With any luck we’ll never be far enough form the TARDIS to get out of breath.”

“Except for the injury thing,” Nardole, the traitor, reminds everyone. “May I remind you, Sir, that you got out of breath this morning walking across the console room twice?”

“You may not.”

“Oh, well, then I won’t.”

“So home we go, and no extra stop where you put yourself at risk for Missy’s redemption,” Bill concludes. She doesn’t sound unhappy about it.

“Unless,” the Doctor begins.

“No,” says Bill. “I have a stapler in my room, and when this sentence ends in any way I do not like, I will get it and punch you with it.”

“Or staple him,” Nardole suggests.

“Missy is going to lead that one,” the Doctor finishes. “And you two help her. I’ll just sit in the TARDIS and judge you.”

“I am going to get my stapler.” Bill actually takes a few steps toward the corridor before she turns to face the Doctor. “I can’t believe you! You want us to be out in a crashing space ship or something, alone, with _her_?”

“You won’t be alone. I’ll be there, watching, just on the other side of the door.” He finally lets go of Missy’s hand to step closer to Bill, and nothing bad happens beyond him feeling the loss. “I need you there with her,” he tells her quietly. “She needs someone to keep an eye on her and remind her why she’s there.”

“Why does it have to be us?” She knows, of course.

“Because you are the only ones I trust with this, if it can’t be me.”

Bill looks irritated, and the Doctor knows she’s giving in. “Alright,” she says. “But at the first sign of trouble we are out of there, and we’re coming back when you are better, because I have no idea how to navigate a crisis on an alien spacecraft, and I don’t trust her to do it in a way we’ll _all_ survive.”

That’s not how the TARDIS works most of the time, but the Doctor doesn’t point that out. Missy makes a sound that could be either offence or acknowledgement.

“And we’re totally bringing the stapler,” Nardole announces.

Well then. With that sort of preparation, what can possibly go wrong?

-

They do not go to that spaceship of unknown origin in the midst of an unknown crisis right away. First, Bill goes to bed, because she is exhausted and needs a break. Nardole goes to his room for some alone time. The Doctor goes to his room, to stare at the ceiling above his bed and then to the pool room, where the water is black and full of stars tonight, and they are not the same stars seen beyond the domed glass ceiling stretched above him.

He sits with his naked feet in the water. The stars ripple, then fall still and even again. He can feel the universe flow around him and thinks about throwing himself into it. Just float in it forever, free.

Something in him calms down as he is sitting here, in his home, with his friends nearby, sleeping peacefully or doing whatever they do, here, in safety. Time flows around him, around them. Moving towards the inevitable parting of their ways, but he is anchored here in this moment where that loss is still far away.

A star explodes in the sky above him, a silent and distant painting of light and colour. The Doctor sees its violent, dramatic death and he already sees the clouds of gas shooting out into the cosmos, lit by the core that remains, all the colours and the potential for something new. It paints the sky, this star – it’s humble beginning as a cloud of gas, it’s majestic birth, its end. And the new stars formed from the ashes.

It is not a projection of some far off place. The Doctor has no knowledge of this sun because it has never been a part of the cosmos he hails from and has not existed before he was here to witness it go. That does not mean that what he is seeing is not real. The star has always existed in all its history. The TARDIS contains a universe.

“She burned a sun up for you.” The stars in the water ripple again as Missy sits beside him. She is speaking high Gallifreyan, an outdated version uncommon even in their youth, and it sounds like a line from a poem. Gallifrey has a lot of poetry, most of it creepy.

This is not from any of it; it’s only her saying that the TARDIS burned up a sun for him.

“It’s just physics at work. The chemical composition and the mass of the star demanded it. It was always going to burn up.”

“Yes,” says Missy. “For you.”

She sits very close to him, and as she falls silent she is resting her head on his shoulder. After a moment, the Doctor leans in and rests his cheek against her hair. They sit in silence while in the water the stars dance and twinkle and above them the death of a giant sun blasts away its atoms, set free to fly across the cosmos, and reunite, and turn into something new.

13 November 2018


End file.
